The Legal-Illegal Market Spectrum of Gambling

Although gambling can be considered to be part of the human condition, for a long time, many countries introduced and maintained restrictions on gambling activities. This offered opportunities for illegal providers, and urbanization and technical innovations increased the scale of illegal gambling from the end of the 19th century onwards. In later decades, many countries chose to decriminalize and regulate all or specific types of gambling. The main aim was to reduce gambling-related crime, without substantially increasing societal costs and gambling addiction. From the perspective of variably legal markets, gambling remained a business activity vulnerable to criminal infiltration. Particularly, the emergence of online gambling in the 1990s posed new challenges to nation-states’ regulatory regimes and offered new opportunities to illegal operators. This chapter addresses inter alia different types of gambling and regulatory systems, responses to illegal gambling activities, gambling-related crimes and harms, gambling markets, and actors who operate on these, and discusses different aspects of gambling from the perspective of variably legal markets.